Police have no leads as to who could have fired shots at the Lexington Herald-Leader offices on Sunday.

This is the world we live in: It's now OK for public officials to encourage violence against journalism and not pay any price for it.

We saw that last week when Montana congressional candidate Greg Gianforte pummeled a reporter — in front of other reporters — yet won his special election and was gleefully accepted into the GOP fold. And we see it all the time with a President who describes all critical stories against him as "fake news."

Amid this climate of consequence-free violence against reporters, shots were fired into the offices of the Lexington Herald-Leader on Sunday morning. Local cops don't know who did it, nor do they have any leads. And the paper itself didn't speculate on what might have provoked a gunman to unload on a newsroom. (Update: Someone also made a bomb threat to a newspaper print plant during the same weekend of anti-journalist mayhem, another local paper reported.)

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin called a reporter who was writing about the deal he got on his mansion a “sick man.”

On Saturday, Bevin had called Courier-Journal reporter Tom Loftus a "sick man" for allegedly being "caught sneaking" around the home in question — a lie, by the way. He also used the hashtag #PeepingTom to demean Loftus. Oddly, Loftus's visit to Bevin's Anchorage home was back in March, so it's unclear why Bevin decided to attack Loftus this weekend — except that he is again under scrutiny for how he got such a great home for such a great price.

I'll leave it to Loftus, a solid reporter, to explore Mansiongate — but he's obviously gotten under Bevin's skin, judging by the governor's 13-minute, anti-media tirade on Friday, one day before the "sick man" tweet, that I've embedded at the bottom of this story. In the statement, Bevin said the media is "destroying good people and their reputations," which was kind of funny because he said that line seconds after doing just that to the state's own attorney general. But again, I'm not on the ground in Kentucky, so I'm not going to speculate who is the lesser public servant: the governor or the attorney general.

Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte was charged with assaulting a reporter and still won his election.

(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

But here's some evidence in favor of Bevin being the lower lowlife: he's the one who attacked a specific journalist and entire news organizations — and thinks he can do so with impunity.

This is the world we now live in, where gun-toting yahoos think they can fire into newsrooms hours after the governor of Kentucky says journalists are "sick" people. Or GOP candidates for the House can beat up reporters. It's not hard to see how we got here: The President derides reporters all the time, including paraphrasing the repressive Soviet regime when he calls reporters "the enemy of the people." His Twitter stream lights up with support whenever he attacks reporters, as did Gianforte's in Montana.

But Bevin got what he wanted: In Kentucky, reporters are under attack, instead of the governor. And that's what's truly "sick."